I was Googling and came across EagleACD, which I had never heard of, so I decided to check them out. They are a hosted-ACD platform or hosted contact center platform if you will.. that is similar to CosmoCom, which TMC has covered extensively over the years. I even reviewed CosmoCom several years ago and CosmoCom is also a past TMC Labs Innovation Award winner.
The basic premise of a hosted call center platform is to offer a unified IP contact center suite that includes multi-channel ACD, IVR, e-mail queue and response integration, skills-based routing, CTI, predictive dialing, multimedia/call recording and administrative tools - all in an affordable turnkey hosted package that requires a low-monthly hosted service charge. Many of hosted call center solutions leverage VoIP for remote agents to access the system. Hosted CRM/call center solutions offer many advantages, such as avoiding the upfront hardware equipment costs and integration hassles of integrating several best of breed call center products.
Well, EagleACD offers all of those aforementioned features and more. EagleACD facility utilizes Synchronous Optical Network (SONET)/Synchronous Digital Hierarchy (SDH) connections with dual physical entrances for all network connections.
Here's EagleACD's architecture:
Here's an interesting quote from their website that lists another advantage of the "hosted model":
"Call centers may also have capacity needs that vary seasonally, or in accordance with marketing promotions. As an example, let’s assume that in a given month an enterprise with 100 agents may need only 25 to have full telephony, Internet and messaging contact capabilities while the remainder have only telephony and messaging capabilities; a sudden Internet promotion by the marketing department may require the company in the next month to have 400 agents with Internet capabilities. As subscribers of a EagleACD service, they can easily throttle this capability from month to month by subscribing more seats on demand and avoid the chaos."
EagleACD VoIP softphone client with Chat |
It's good to see more hosted call center solutions enter the market, especially those leveraging VoIP technology. I'm going to have to check this product out in the labs when I get a chance...